Hello Everyone,
I have been watching the thread about Destiny's Twin, and noticing that most of us plan to have our Twin be a crafter, so our main character can train adventuring skills full time. While I think that is cool for those of us with the Twin benefit, the majority of players will come from the general public that weren't part of the Kickstarter.

I would like to discuss the possibility of separating gathering/processing/crafting skills from class skills. I believe that "professions" should be on their own timer, distinct from your normal character abilities. This would allow all characters to craft, but it wouldn't take away from those people that choose to focus on crafting, if designed well. The required "merit badges" to get the higher end crafting abilities would need to require some intense work on the part of the crafter, and show the kind of dedication that most casual crafters wouldn't be interested in. I trust that the designers at GW could come up with a system that would not make us sacrifice class advancement, in order to be involved in the market place.

My sentiment is that time happens once, so each character gets to accumulate time once.

My understanding is that the advantage of the 'destiny's twin' kickstarter perk is that I will be able to buy premium time for one twin and it will accumulate on the other as well.

How that time/experience is spent is a different transaction. My inference is that if I accumulate enough experience I can gain multiple 'merit badges' that turn that experience into abilities and skills.

So the prime-time activated character accumulates a reservoir of xp points which at some later point I can assign to various actions in game that could result in multiple distinct awards simultaneously.

In practice what I envision is that while my main is adventuring around the destiny's twin alt is also accumulating xp. I might stick with my main many months. Then when I am ready to work with my destiny's twin, I will then have a tremendous pool of xp I can spend as soon as I can gain the skill accomplishments.

Honestly, I am not sure how the skill training/que will work. From my very limited experience of EVE, you ‘can’ set multiple skills at once. So I don’t see why you couldn’t set a class skill or skill from the crafting tree in the que. However, you will need to decide which you want to raise first.

Now if you mean you should be able to raise both at the same time, I disagree with that. One of the things I’ve liked about GW has said about crafting is it is going to be treated equally as any archetype. But if you allow a crafting skill to go up at the same time as a class skill (from an archetype), you are taking away from those who are going to be dedicated crafters. Why should you be able to raise a class skill and a crafting skill, but not raise two skills from two different archetypes?

The only way I would be ok with this is if a dedicated crafter could specialize in two skill trees (I’m assuming there will be multiple crafting skill trees). So in your example, you would have the class archetype (let’s say Wizard) and ‘one’ of the crafting skills (let’s say Weaponsmithing) you can raise at the same time. Where someone who wants to be a dedicated crafter, you could raise Weaponsmithing ‘and’ Blacksmithing.

With that, the player who wants to be a classed archetype can raise both his class and crafting at the same time, where the dedicated crafter can raise two crafting skills from two different skill trees.

But I really don’t think we will be able to raise both at the same time, and that is ok with me too.

It may not be quite an all or nothing proposition. We need to know more about what skills will be available and how they interact. In the course of training crafting armor, for example, one might actually be training in armor wearing (light, medium, heavy) at the same timee, just perhaps slower. While a char that spends most of his time training on wearing armor may also get a training bump in armor craftsmanship.

New players may indeed be faced with some hard choices. Buying another slot or account for a char might be an option. Those who wish to dedicate themselves to crafting might quickly catch up to those who are only crafting sometimes.

Your question raised a strange question for me. Well organized guilds often get access to materials cheaper and rarer than what a new or solo player can. If the new player can't produce goods as cheaply or get access to rarer mats, would this be a form of griefing? (Big business/monopolies vs. mom and pop) Or is joining a guild going to be mandatory for those who wish to survive as a crafter?
Thoughts?

I believe that "professions" should be on their own timer, distinct from your normal character abilities. This would allow all characters to craft, but it wouldn't take away from those people that choose to focus on crafting, if designed well. The required "merit badges" to get the higher end crafting abilities would need to require some intense work on the part of the crafter, and show the kind of dedication that most casual crafters wouldn't be interested in. I trust that the designers at GW could come up with a system that would not make us sacrifice class advancement, in order to be involved in the market place.

I think you've got this backwards. It seems to me that sacrificing class advancement to be involved in the marketplace is the point.

With all skills competing, you'll have specialists in combat and gathering and crafting. Eventually people will get everything they need and be able to do things more independently, but that's not something that's just handed out.

Letting people double up the way you're suggesting is a fine solution for games that don't care about crafting or assume that everyone will be crafting their own stuff. But a game that wants trade and interaction between professions, it's a step in the wrong direction.

Perhaps more importantly, giving away trade skills for free immediately sends a signal to players that those skills are, well, worthless. If you want people to take crafting as seriously as combat, it has to require the same investment as combat.

Doubling up makes sense in a theme park game where convenience of playtime at the sacrifice of human interaction is a design feature. For PFO, where the core design goal is to maximize human interaction, the fact that you have to make meaningful choices about what you are going to prioritize for skills training is critical. Then everybody needs everybody.

I am not suggesting that Crafting is worthless, but that Crafters should not be defenseless, or unskilled in anything else. I do like the idea of some kind of hybrid, as suggested above. e.g., crafting armor gives some kind of bonus to the use of said armor, due to a greater understanding, etc...
I believe that if the merit badge system is implemented in a way that makes them less than trivial, people will choose their path with their actions. I just hate the idea of being "forced" to be one dimensional, because of the skill timer.

Of course, I often play devil's advocate for my own ideas. If crafting is going to be unique, it needs to be hard and take sacrifice. That will lead to fewer crafters, with greater specialization. That might actually be the intent.

I also have to echo the idea that training crafting and class skills with no delay to either is a bad idea. There are players who want to be specialists, who enjoy nothing but the market. Those players should be better in their specialty than someone who has spent equal amounts of time with an adventuring focus.

Adventuring, PVPing, Crafting, harvesting etc... should all be optional paths, and if you want to spend the training time on doing all of them in 3rds, good on you, but doing all 4 together should mean 1/4th the speed of training any of them.

Someone sets in mind to be the best darn crafter in the area, they should gain crafting significantly faster than the guy who wants to focus on being a cleric, who sets a crafting skill to train because, why not, no sense letting the craft training portion sit there idle.

I see no problem with boosting the efficacy of armor for an armor crafter. makes perfect sense to me. Just let it be part of a tier of armorcrafting skill that is primarily the actual crafting of that type of armor.

At the same time it should not be as good as, say, a fighter specifically training in that armor type.

If a fighter is also an armorer then his armor skill for a type he can craft should enjoy the fighter skill stacking with the armorer skill.

So, I was loosely thinking about what my problems were with time-based advancement and how I'd solve them. To me, being able to earn crafting or gathering *experience* I could spend to somewhat progress those skills while I was *actively* training combat would do that.

Yeah, that's why I proposed separating Crafting skills from Adventuring skills and allowing both to be trained simultaneously. I keep going back and forth on whether that's a good idea. There's a strong argument that a system like that would hurt pure crafters.

I highly recommend reading the whole thread.

I'm still very torn about the whole thing, but I think my favorite idea is to give the player a detailed tool to specify what their character is doing during "downtime" - including skill training as well as things like scribing scrolls. And then to limit each skill's possible training time to a certain percent of the character's downtime. This would effectively force the player to generalize a little bit, and avoid the problem where everyone feels like if they're not advancing 100% down a particular path then they're "gimped".

Note that "downtime" doesn't have to be offline. It's just an easy term to use to describe the stuff that we can do offline.

I have been watching the thread about Destiny's Twin, and noticing that most of us plan to have our Twin be a crafter, so our main character can train adventuring skills full time. While I think that is cool for those of us with the Twin benefit, the majority of players will come from the general public that weren't part of the Kickstarter.

I would like to discuss the possibility of separating gathering/processing/crafting skills from class skills. I believe that "professions" should be on their own timer, distinct from your normal character abilities. This would allow all characters to craft, but it wouldn't take away from those people that choose to focus on crafting, if designed well. The required "merit badges" to get the higher end crafting abilities would need to require some intense work on the part of the crafter, and show the kind of dedication that most casual crafters wouldn't be interested in. I trust that the designers at GW could come up with a system that would not make us sacrifice class advancement, in order to be involved in the market place.

What does the community think of this?

I appreciate the topic you want to adress, especially considering the Destiny's Twin benefit, but considering what I have read about the game, and hear from the community, I don't think that this will be a problem.

Apparently there are quite a number of players willing to play crafters who aren't all that interested in the other parts of the game. The reason that so many plan to use their twin for crafting is that we don't quite know how they will handle crafting - and do not want to miss something.

I'm still very torn about the whole thing, but I think my favorite idea is to give the player a detailed tool to specify what their character is doing during "downtime" - including skill training as well as things like scribing scrolls. And then to limit each skill's possible training time to a certain percent of the character's downtime. This would effectively force the player to generalize a little bit, and avoid the problem where everyone feels like if they're not advancing 100% down a particular path then they're "gimped".

Note that "downtime" doesn't have to be offline. It's just an easy term to use to describe the stuff that we can do offline.

I'm entirely fine with say multiple skill slots to train, just pretending we have a point system here, slot A moves at 20 points/hour, slot B at 10 points, slot C at 5 points.

That being said, I don't agree that they need to be generalized. IE if a cleric wishes to train, mace training, Channel energy, and divine healing, and never touch a crafting or harvesting skill in his career, that should be fine.

As should a pure crafter, if he wishes to train "leather refining, light armor crafting, and cobbling" at the same time, that also should be allowed.

I strongly oppose requiring an adventurer to dabble in crafting (or making a portion of their training go unutilized if they don't, and yes if someone wants to be a hybrid cleric who sets himself up as

A. Divine spells
B. Heavy armor crafting
C. Channel energy

That should also be fully permissible.

The biggest key though, is that skills should not need to be maxed to be worth using. IE if your cleric is entirely useless in parties until it gets 6 months worth of training in slot A. That is a problem regardless of the system, As it is if anything but max rank crafter goods are pure garbage. The system needs to continually create demand for adventurers of all skill ranges, PVPers of all skill ranges, crafters of all skill ranges etc...

We should not hit a point of "OK I've started training X, in 5 months I'll even be able to use it".

As someone who currently plans to run a crafter on his main, I'd prefer being a dedicated crafter to actually MEAN something, and given that the devs have said crafters will be as much an archetype as any other, I think we'll see that.

As someone who currently plans to run a crafter on his main, I'd prefer being a dedicated crafter to actually MEAN something, and given that the devs have said crafters will be as much an archetype as any other, I think we'll see that.

They probably will differ in one aspect: People may be able to learn some crafting playing other archetypes w/o loosing the cap bonus and also crafters may learn stuff from another archetype w/o lossing any eventual cap bonus, the DEVs probably will create to reward dedicated crafters. So you could be a crafter but learn some magic skills from mage pathway for example.

Horrible idea IMO. You wouldn't be creating a sword in a smithy while combat training with one at the same time. Keep the skill timers separate. It promotes a longer life in the game since you can't max out and have everything you want right away.

If the crafter is going to be a role, the same way thief abilities or ranger abilities are roles, then I say keep them separate. If crafters get no devotion bonus for slotting all crafting abilities, then sure mix them.

If the crafter is going to be a role, the same way thief abilities or ranger abilities are roles, then I say keep them separate. If crafters get no devotion bonus for slotting all crafting abilities, then sure mix them.

I think crafters will have lots of bonuses, least I hope so :D

Well I would have to say... the slotting bonuses dosn't exactly make much sense in the context of crafting. Considering going out on the field, all archtypes have uses, and there's pro's and cons to having any skill.

In the middle of town, making weapons/armor... Well it isn't exactly a hinderance to need to take 2 minutes to change into your adventurer clothes, or to shift from headgear crafting to shoe crafting etc... The very definition of crafting more or less implies non-time sensitive, and a lack of need or benefit to multitasking.

With the exception of one potentially cool possibility (though huge annoyance at the same time if it were true), If gear were damaged regularly over the course of battle, and a field repair tactician were necessary. Which sounds really cool within that context, though then you think about it, as meaning your gear needing repairs within the timeframe of a single battle, and it starts sounding pretty obnoxious, unless it specifically only pertains to formation combat. (IE large scale wars where both sides would be able to bring in these crafters)

With the exception of one potentially cool possibility (though huge annoyance at the same time if it were true), If gear were damaged regularly over the course of battle, and a field repair tactician were necessary. Which sounds really cool within that context, though then you think about it, as meaning your gear needing repairs within the timeframe of a single battle, and it starts sounding pretty obnoxious, unless it specifically only pertains to formation combat. (IE large scale wars where both sides would be able to bring in these crafters)

It would open the door for crafters to make a pile of coin hiring their repair services out to groups, CCs and settlements planning on war. I bet a wandering crafter could make a living just by that alone.

It would open the door for crafters to make a pile of coin hiring their repair services out to groups, CCs and settlements planning on war. I bet a wandering crafter could make a living just by that alone.

Oh agreed, I absolutely see the good, on the other hand I do think it would be a painful level of hastle for crafters to become a critical member of normal parties. But in the event that say formations had abilities that could deal a special type of armor damage that crafters were needed for, I could imagine that as a pretty cool system.

Course it does have to be done carefully, I remember in a ragnarok online, there was one PVP class that was simultaniously critical and worthless because of a system like that. Alchemists had 2 key abilities in PVP. 1. The ability to break enemies armor, 2. The ability to grant their side immunity to all armor breaking effects. So essentially every PVP group had to have an alchemist, but when both sides had an alchemist, they did nothing.

Horrible idea IMO. You wouldn't be creating a sword in a smithy while combat training with one at the same time. Keep the skill timers separate. It promotes a longer life in the game since you can't max out and have everything you want right away.

If time passes continuously and you know you will be offline for the next 16 hours then it will not advance your character faster to be able to apply 50% of that time to one skill, 25% to another, 15% to another, and 10% to a fourth skill. Your primary skill would instead advance half as fast as it would were the character dedicated to training one skill.

Mathematically it makes no difference if you train 2 skills at once at %50 for 2 hours or 2 skills in a row at %100 for an hour each. I see no reason why you could or could not split up your skills as long as mathematically it was the same.

Mathematically it makes no difference if you train 2 skills at once at %50 for 2 hours or 2 skills in a row at %100 for an hour each. I see no reason why you could or could not split up your skills as long as mathematically it was the same.

Well, yes, but if you do that you are effectively gimping yourself with no benefit. If you are training two skills at once for 50% on both you will be mechanically inferior at the 50% mark where another character had trained the first skill at 100% and is now training the second. You catch up at the end of the training period, but for half of the training time you are at a disadvantage to someone else who spent the same training time training the same skills as you.

While there will always be sub-optimal choices, I think that GW should take steps to stop really bad ones from being made. And splitting training time between multiple skills with no mechanical benefit is a trap for players and should not be allowed.

Well, yes, but if you do that you are effectively gimping yourself with no benefit. If you are training two skills at once for 50% on both you will be mechanically inferior at the 50% mark where another character had trained the first skill at 100% and is now training the second. You catch up at the end of the training period, but for half of the training time you are at a disadvantage to someone else who spent the same training time training the same skills as you.

But that remains to be seen. As you allude to in your post, there could be mechanical bonuses (synergies) that come from training skills together. If this were true, it could make training in 2 or more things at the same time a very positive thing to do. Anyway, I don't think we can make the assumption that train one skill to 100% is the way to go yet. We will need to wait and see on some of these things.